by J.W. Carey
But still, the spirals on the first and eighth window panes drew my gaze, spinning the outside world into something approaching focus. The cobblestones, rising above the sudden onset of rain as though forgotten civilisations emerging from the ocean, combined with the dull, sullen grass and the blackly glittering asphalt to form the vaguely threatening abstraction of the ‘outside world’.
Outside, despite the sudden inclemency of the weather, characters even younger than I gathered in sullen masses, each one huddled within his, or her, own oversized-hoodie. Typically, their legs were encased in that spectacular kind of skinny jean which, as a rule, looked absolutely idiotic on those self-starving and yet slightly overweight children, and, instead, seemed more suited the spectral figure of John Cooper Clarke than to these poor imitators of they knew not what. They showed a devotion which I could never have professed to possess, to stand in the rain outside an ancient pub, simply to be seen to do so.
They would gather and pretend to enjoy the music emerging from those hallowed doors, those which they were denied entry due to their age. They would attempt to know everyone else whom gathered there, that they would have a wider audience to acknowledge their presence, as though attending this gathering was mandatory, as though this muddy, dirty ground had replaced a church for the idiotic conformity.
‘How unique I am,’ each would repeat to themselves, ‘this music is what defines me, and I am different because of it.’ Each one, of course, seemingly unaware of the folly of such a statement, each one aware that their companions defined themselves thus and, yet, the belief that they were unique also still hung heavy around them all.
Idiots.
But, even within these hallowed walls, even crowded around those pitted wooden supports, the future of the self-titled counter-culture spread out before me. Every one of them, once some long-haired rebel who saw the world as his for the picking, every woman who once wore a boyfriend’s leather jacket as they screamed amidst some thrashing crowd, had aged under their failures. The men, all balding and in possession of a prodigious beer belly, clutched at their cheap beer as though it was the last thing they owned, as though the mere act of allowing themselves entry into this place was still some kind of rebellion against the innate respectability of middle-age and middle-class. The woman, instead, drank at weak cider or supped at their wine, alternating between nervous muttering and raucous screeching which, at times, blotted out even the sound of the jukebox.
‘Idiots!’ I said aloud, just as the song drew to a close. The failure of my tongue, to hold itself still, caused a few once-sharp looks, long since dulled with age and alcohol and apathy, to shoot in my direction, a dull anger drunkenly scrawled across their grey faces. I fought my nature, and refused to reply with any apologetic glance, instead sinking my lips into the flow of alcohol again, losing myself amidst its stagnant rush.
* * *
‘I thought, once,’ he ended, slipping his hands from his chains as easily as he lies to you, ‘that in order to gain some wisdom, some insight into the way this world of ours works, I had to make myself suffer. I had to drive myself through some weakened version of an atheist’s Hell, I had to chain myself to impossible tasks and lament my lack of ability to see them through. I loved people that would, could, never know what the word meant, and I broke people as they tried to maintain my sanity. I threw myself into an adversarial role, one of madness and folly and cold logic.’
‘I had to remind myself and, by extension, you, that all existence ends in dust. That all meaning is, ultimately, meaningless and that the threats of the Norns hang in impossibly distant caverns, clinging to the roots of Yggdrasil. I had to make my work, my hobby, little more than an extension of sorrow I endeavoured to feel. An emotion, or rather, a state of mind, to which I became addicted. Like some opiate dependant failure, I would shudder in my joy, a symptom of miserable withdrawal.’
‘What was it Columbia said? ‘Stay sane inside insanity?’ He sighs, rolling his wrists as though the loose comfort of authority had left some desperate longing upon his flesh. ‘That is where I failed. Like every sub-culture, like every intellectual who can, somehow, manage to look themselves in the mirror, I forgot what I held to be important.’ He reached down into the shadows of the desk, the clicking of his shackles parting around his ankles quiet under his speech.
‘I considered approaching the world as a real author would, with a pen clasped between my teeth, whilst my hands were busy with a pair of scissors and a pot of cheap glue. I would, in the name of Art, if not that of myself, cannibalise the novel. If the anti-novel was to be a genre, than I would rule that which was the anti-novella, with a silken glove enwrapped in an iron fist.’ He blinks, for the first time in what feels like forever.
‘No, that is a lie also. I am harmless, despite what I might think of myself. I’m the silken hand beneath the iron glove. I’m a politician, pretending that my words mean anything, or that honesty is possible within language. I’m an artist rejecting the title, assuring myself that one day someone can understand me.’ Here, he turns back to the screen.
‘And so I created you. I created someone within whom the possibility of understanding was positioned, planted in the dirt of that society. But you are not a flower; you’re not even alive. You’re a dead man walking because I desired it to be so. I want your understanding, I don’t want to be alone anymore, on this pedestal of my genius hewn from bone and stolen thought.’ He rubs at his eyes. He’s tired. ‘But there isn’t room up here for more than one, and the fall from this height will kill me, though I might land in your outstretched arms.’
He rises from the seat in which he has spent too long already. The papers complete their escape from the printer, slipping out into the warmth of the dark room. He lifts them as one, takes a few silent seconds to organise them, and leaves the room; light bullying into the shadows around his silhouette.
Dylan Thomas
The sounds faded away, distance allowing the death of the thing I had been told would never die, the death of the thing I had been told was already gone. The uneven cobblestones spoke to me, their judgement sending my feet uncomfortably rocking around them, my ankles twisting as I fought through the haze and the ill-will of stone, abused by the mammals the same as myself, to remain upright. The stars were invisible, hidden away behind the layer of light hovering above the town. I tilted my head back, enjoying the strength of the breeze on my sweat-coated skin, the fingertips of the Mother brushing past me in that idle way they always managed to do.
I staggered, of course, flesh and leather and rubber failing against the rock. I caught myself against the Face. My hands caught against his jaw, my head mere inches from the metallic emptiness of his nobleman`s jutting chin. Disgust was carved into those eyes, as though this thing were judging me. Judging me!
Its lips unmoving as they were and sealed by the fury of some artiste`s blowtorch, still managed to work out the words to berate me. Ashamed, it told me: ashamed to have emerged from anything which could pretend to a similarity with thee. As He raged at me, for failures I justified as though someone else was behind them, as though success had been dangled before me like a spider on a thread and had been whipped away as my hand went to grasp it, I loved him. I loved him for hating me, for being who I needed him to be. I heard his threats and his complaints wash against me, I heard the rattle of a keyboard and the choke of tears.
The metal had entered me silently, and I was drunk to the point that I barely even noticed it. I had felt it only as a coolness, a companion to the night air at which I grasped, my fingers twisted into claws for purchase. I had felt hands pawing at my breast pocket, covering my heart, and welcomed their touch. What greater purpose could I find, I asked myself, than to help those less fortunate than myself, whilst I still had some breath in my lungs and some blood in my veins? They cried out at their success, my wallet coming free in their hands. What did it matter? They were welcome to it, let the money-god encircle them in his hands and h
ave him leave me alone. I hoped that they were of stronger constitution than myself, that they might find some enjoyment within those papers which I had not. Or they could waste it, throw it to the winds and laugh whilst they did so. That thought, even as they scattered around me, gave me a thrill of pleasure. What I wouldn’t give to see them on the White Cliffs, dancing in a wild frenzy under the sun, whilst the shredded paper bearing a monarch’s face blew around them, a hurricane wholly for them. The warmth hit me then. I realised one youth still stood there, and his eyes met mine. The terror held within was sharp and fierce and I knew that it was the first time he had felt alive. His pupils had dilated, far too narrow for the meagre brightness of the night.
‘Oh,’ I had muttered, ‘what desperation! What is so important to you, that you look at me so?’ He jerked back as though I had stung him, as I may well have done. I realised the knife was clasped in his hand, the blood already coating the weapon. He leapt back again, turning to run, and I caught sight of his profile in the streetlight. His brow was strong, protruding out over the wide eyes and the sunken cheekbones. He didn’t look ill, but the yellow light above us did little to compliment his complexion; lips too red twisting around some combination of emotions which he could not comprehend.
But the face above me drones on, it mutters to me of life and death and how the two are interchangeable. It tells me that it doesn’t matter when I die, so long as I do. It tells me that nothing lasts forever and that I, me, am nothing in the grand scheme of some Omni-potent deity, some author with an over-inflated sense of self-worth. I reject it, calmly, knowing that the voice is wrong. No man is the master of my fate. It wasn’t the author who dragged me here, who chained me to myself. It wasn’t the author who left me at this monument’s non-existent feet, bleeding quietly into the night. Every decision I have made, every choice that has brought me to this point, was an exercise in humanity. For what is a man, I asked the motionless lips, but a collection of meat and bone and self-deception, the only animal to burden itself with a conscience? I could have been happier, I thought, had I been some baser creature. Some dog hunting in the woods, some urchin clinging to a rock or some ill-educated thing, looking at the moon and pondering its distant mysteries.
* * *
The blue-clad nurses are frozen in place, some caught mid-step, others bending over the recumbent forms of their patients. The doctor, the only one visible, is caught striding down the avenue formed by the beds. He is captured perfectly, and the frozen state screams out his personality greater than any conversation ever could. One perfectly clean, black leather shoe is swinging and the other is half-off the floor already. He appears taller as a result, gaining perhaps two inches in his semi-levitation. His coat, a long white prop from some badly-written medical drama, billows out behind him, whilst his white shirt and black trousers barely rustle as he moves, not a single crease or shadow to be found on either pristine garment. His tie has twisted slightly, his movement disturbing that, at least, from its position. His hair is slicked back with just the right amount of brylcreem, of course he wouldn’t use mere gel; he was the very epitome of a man. His jaw was strong, with the beginnings of stubble, and his eyes were dark recesses in his tanned skin. But it was the way he held himself, like a lord come to survey his domain, which engendered him to dislike. He resembled the kind of action figure a child might receive, at a time when doctors were dangerously sparse. One designed to fix the image in a developing mind, like a harmless form of indoctrination. He is still some feet away, and is staring straight ahead, as though these dying men and women were beneath one such as him.
He looks, without guilt, at the thing lying on the bed. The once white sheets are red, the stitches unable to hold back the entirety of the bloody deluge. The deepest colour is just above the space where his right hip lies, obscured by the cheap material. The things feet are poking out from beneath the blanket, dirty boots hanging off the edge of the mattress. Its arms, bloody themselves, are spread out; hands falling limp. The desk by the bed is almost empty, holding only a phone, an mp3, a wallet, a set of keys and a polystyrene cup of water, the kind normally reserved for hurried cups of tea at roadside kiosks.
He takes an empty chair from beside the bed a few feet away, almost nodding in an apology to the woman with a black eye and a broken arm before he catches himself. The scrape of the metal legs on the smooth floor wakes the thing, its eyes opening in a panic. No, he tells himself, only a replication of panic. As the pair of eyes falls on the tall figure by the bedside, it groans, hoarsely for water. He passes it the cup on the desk. It drinks, greedily, sloppily, allowing as much to run into the sparse beard as into its mouth.
It tosses the cup away. He watches it move some feet away before it curves back on itself, rolling in ever-shrinking circles until it finally rocks into stillness. He looks again at the thing. It is staring at him now, eyes a parody of his own, and He could not know what emotions raged behind them, what thoughts flickered like electricity behind the blank gaze. He sat down beside the thing and waited for the words to come.
‘Why have you forsaken me?’
He stares at it. The voice was, essentially, his own, but malformed; as though it came to him from a great distance, curving through a lead pipe and losing something along its interminable journey. The question was one he would never have dared to ask. He had never had anyone to ask it to. Does he see himself in me, He wonders, can he see the same facial hair though cut back, the same hair though combed? Are those eyes, those eyes I gave him, tracing the lines of my throat and wondering what would happen to him if I died here? Could it, even now, leap up from its weakened state, toss aside the bloody covering and leap towards me? The words echo in His head and He pities the thing then, for the fierce look on its face. Its lips are twisted into a snarl, its brow is tightened above its eyes. It was terrified of him, He realised. An irreligious man facing the God he denied; the heathen facing the God against whom he railed.
‘I loved you.’ He says, leaning towards the thing. ‘When you lay before me, naked and unknowing, I thought of myself as your father. I was your creator; I moulded you from the hazy reflections I had of myself, in between sobriety and incomprehensibility. You were to be the bridge between logic and belief, between art and reality.’ He goes to rub his eyes, but stops himself. God would not appear weak before his creations. ‘The very second consciousness wormed its way into you, the day you awoke from the apathy I gave you, when you could differentiate between Good and Evil, that is when my love died. It was forced out by your desire to see the world for what it is; how can anyone love someone so obsessed?’
‘You moulded me in your image?’ The thing laughs, the noise twisting into a series of coughs which wrack at its body. It bends in pain and lowers it head to its chest. He is glad of that, allowing himself a sympathetic expression whilst the thing was distracted. His face is blank again, by the time the tortured face glares at him. ‘Then all my faults are yours, then I am you but a product of the world you have allowed to exist. Then sin does not exist, the logic is a failure, then science can be ignored as chance and your will is fate.’
It sags back into the single cushion provided for it. The right hand still holds the area around the wound, the puncture in its flank. Though the pain is still the most prominent feature, it is clear that there is something resembling satisfaction in the set of its features, as though some question has been answered; a long-niggling doubt resolved.
‘You know, I heard a theory once; about you. The guy was drunk, as you have made most of my acquaintances. He claimed that the Devil had maimed you, that he had hacked off your limbs and buried them in the corners of the earth. He said, in a voice that brooked no disagreement despite the slurring, that he had burnt your tongue from between your lips. Your eyes, your ears, your nose; those he left in place. He left your eyes that you might see the suffering your absence brings to the world. He left your ears, that you might hear the prayers and know that they will go unanswered. He
left your nose that you might smell the blood and the fire which the world fell to. In some act of unimaginable evil, a torture bordering on the human in its ferocity, he left you as a bloodied stump on your own throne, surrounded by angels who would never dare to touch you, for fear of their own sins becoming known.’ The thing enjoyed itself in an overly-dramatic glance at Him, taking in his arms and legs. ‘I guess he was wrong, but it always kind of made sense to me. How, I would ask myself, could someone watch the world, watch the people they created and not intervene, in some manner, in some form?’
‘What makes you think I did not intervene? What makes you think that this world is the worst it could be? You have read a lot, I have made you; you know the worlds that could exist in your planet’s place. The fantasies of Orwell, Huxley or Rand could have taken control so easily. An errant word here, a misunderstood action there, and the economies of this world would crumble, your societies would fail and turn against each other. Without my intervention, you would all have ended up like the apes you laugh at on your televisions, you would live in areas that make the favelas of Brazil look like your idea of Heaven and you would eat each other. You are the only character I created in this world. The remnants are a haze; a background noise to flesh out the grey existence I replicated.’
It was silent for a long time, occasionally twitching in pain to itself; a dying animal unaware of any good intention. A beast, content simply to focus on the ever-shrinking world it finds itself in. He pitied it then, as He pitied a bird He once saw, lying broken on the pavement beside a busy road. He had stopped to watch that creature as well and, now, He found events replicating themselves faster than He could conjure up some valuable imagery to abuse for His own purposes. It took a long time, but the creature finally spoke up again.
